What if elections, which are a cornerstone of democracy, don't produce the outcomes that we desire?

Terry Bouricius spent twenty years as an elected lawmaker in Vermont - city council, then the statehouse - followed by a decade at FairVote trying to fix elections with better elections. Then he quit. Since 2005 he has been the leading American theorist of sortition: choosing the people who govern by lottery, the way we choose juries — a practice rooted in Athenian democracy.

This is a conversation about an idea most Americans have never encountered, and about why it keeps working wherever it is tried. Ireland used randomly selected conventions to settle same-sex marriage and abortion. Melbourne handed a stuck capital budget to 43 taxpayers chosen by lot. Connecticut is running the first statewide citizens' assembly in the United States right now. And the argument underneath it all is disarmingly simple: you can't lobby a jury. No donors, no primary, no next race, no way to know six months out whose ear to buy.

Recorded before the 2026 midterms. We close on elections themselves - and Bouricius, an election-reform veteran who says the machinery is sound, names the thing that actually frightens him.

Guest:

Terry Bouricius - former Vermont legislator, ten years at FairVote, originator of the multi-body sortition model, co-founder of Democracy R&D. His book "Democracy Without Politicians: Government By the People" (Routledge, 2026) is open access - the full text is free.

https://democracywithoutpoliticians.org

https://terrybouricius.com

https://democracycreative.substack.com

https://sortitionusa.org

https://democracyrd.org

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open: what if jurors were elected?

0:46 Intro

2:23 Twenty years in office, and why he left

5:40 What sortition actually is

5:53 Athens: a democracy because of the lottery, not the assembly

7:59 British Columbia, 2004: "This is what democracy looks like"

11:10 The 200-year project and the peeling strategy

14:19 Why left and right both nod along

15:43 You can't lobby a jury

17:25 More likely to die in office than lose an election

17:37 Plato's ship vs. the wisdom of crowds

18:21 A thousand assemblies, and Macron's climate convention

19:57 Connecticut: the first statewide assembly in the US

20:43 Aristotle: the lot is democratic, election is oligarchic

22:10 What Madison and the founders actually feared

26:09 "How many of us are renters?"

28:35 Cognitive diversity: why the room beats the experts

33:27 Designing against bribery and capture

35:09 Binding or advisory? Melbourne's budget

37:58 Ireland: marriage and abortion, decided by lot

40:00 The abuse survivor and the gay juror

44:47 Tribal loyalty: Obamacare, tariffs, switching sides

50:22 Groupthink, facilitators, and multi-body sortition

52:35 Agenda-setting: the wall, the bridges, the climate

55:33 AI: the bubble, and who gets to decide

58:29 Could AI agents replace a citizens' assembly?

62:09 What to do Monday: Sortition USA

63:10 The book is free

67:02 Are the midterms secure?

67:54 The refusal to seat: "a real possibility within two months"

69:59 Outro and links

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news

Half a percent doesn't sound like much. In a close midterm, it is everything.

Dr. Jen Golbeck has spent two decades as a computer scientist studying what the internet can figure out about you without being told — and she now spends her nights as a working journalist inside the most extreme corners of American politics. Both halves of that job point at the same machine: an economy built on collecting everything about everyone, and online communities that offer people the one thing they most want, which is belonging.

Dave and Jen talk about how far surveillance has actually gone, why she thinks the AI bubble is at its top edge, what a decade inside far-right forums has taught her about how ordinary people radicalize, what she saw on the street in Minneapolis during the ICE protests, and what is genuinely worth doing between now and November.

Guest

Dr. Jen Golbeck — Professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information and director of the Social Intelligence Lab. She writes the daily MAGAReport newsletter and reports for HuffPost and Esquire.

MAGAReport | UMD faculty page | HuffPost | Esquire: a weekend with the Proud Boys | TED: Is AI progress stuck?

Also mentioned: the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legislation tracker.

Chapters

00:00 - Cold open and intro

01:28 - Meet Dr. Jen Golbeck

03:52 - Surveillance, extremism, and the American ideal

06:07 - How bad has surveillance actually gotten

07:49 - The phone-number trick and the data-broker machine

10:01 - The TEDx talk that made the tech bros angry

13:46 - A 24-hour amnesty: 40 percent of the class confesses

17:05 - Data centers, bad neighbors, and democratic control

19:18 - The dot-com parallel: is this a bubble?

20:26 - Open source, local models, and the business-model problem

24:52 - Typing pools and the job-apocalypse story

27:37 - The antisocial internet: from privacy to radicalization

29:19 - A weekend with the Proud Boys in North Carolina

32:43 - The symbolic show of strength

36:56 - What cults know about belonging

38:58 - Minneapolis, ICE, and the feel of a civil war

44:26 - What the Charlie Kirk killing revealed

47:13 - Civil war, or Costco?

49:31 - The Facebook experiment: half a percent

52:09 - Citizens United, money, and media consolidation

56:07 - Into the midterms: troops, fraud claims, and lawsuits

58:59 - Why the election infrastructure should hold

1:02:00 - Flock cameras and warrantless tracking

1:03:24 - EFF's tracker: pick one thing and be annoying

1:08:33 - Outro and links

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. america2.news

Scott Reich recently took the TED Democracy stage in Philadelphia to argue that a renewed ethos of service could help repair our fractured country. He joins Dave Troy for a conversation that runs from ancient Athens to a modern "GI Bill for civic service," by way of Robert Putnam, the 1917 baseball All-Star Game, and the simple, radical idea that citizens owe something to one another.

Reich and Troy arrived at similar conclusions by different paths: that social mixing across background, region, and class — not screens and headlines — is how a democracy rebuilds trust. Together they make a hopeful (and stubbornly non-partisan) case for citizenship as a practice, not merely a slogan.

(Production note: a couple of brief internet dropouts affected Scott's audio; we've worked around them.)

Guest:

Scott Reich - presidential historian and attorney; author of "The Power of Citizenship: Why JFK Matters to a New Generation" and the forthcoming "One Day in September: Baseball, Brotherhood, and the Birth of the All-Star Game"; board member of the JFK Library Foundation and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

https://www.scott-reich.com/

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open: why national service

01:18 Meet Scott Reich and the TED Democracy talk

04:34 Citizenship: rights, but also obligations

05:43 From "impossible" to practical: connection and service

07:45 The baseball "farm system": start with the young

10:18 What we stopped teaching: civics and Western civ

12:30 The proposal: a modern GI Bill for civic service

14:03 Ancient Greece and the making of a citizen

15:29 Mandatory or voluntary? Incentives over mandates

18:01 Reviving civic life: Peace Corps, clubs, and lost associations

19:55 The commoditization of youth sports

22:53 We've always argued: Adams, Jefferson, and healthy disagreement

24:49 "One Day in September": how Americans used to gather

29:02 Putnam, disinformation, and the loneliness crisis

30:29 Social mixing as national security

32:54 Cohorts across difference: rural Iowa to the Bronx

37:42 Service, not servitude: beyond the military

43:59 Overestimating the other side

46:05 Leaders as vehicles: JFK and the power of citizenship

50:22 What tragedy teaches: our capacity to unite

54:29 What can one person do? Small acts of citizenship

1:01:13 Outro and links

Host Dave Troy writes at https://america2.news and https://washingtonspectator.org

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news